shredding the Veil
by legendarytobes
Summary: Lydia's never been stupid so when she wakes up from what she knows was a deadly attack by something other than human, she's determined to get to the bottom of it.
1. Chapter 1

When Lydia woke up, when she was able to think again, when the tubes and monitors had all been removed from her, she started to plan. Oh with her mother and father, she just smiled and bore their usual arguments, the standard "This is your fault and that's why I divorced you" jabs. They couldn't possibly understand. She'd already had a day of near-catatonia over a "mountain lion" that she knew now was anything but that. Lydia didn't want their attention on her. Luckily for her once her dad insulted her mom's ability to keep her safe and mom got in a dig about a missed alimony payment, they almost forgot she was there.

Good.

She sat there, nodding in the right places, filtering out her parents' arguing, thinking over what had happened.

Something had attacked her.

Something.

Not a man. It had looked like a man, but it hadn't been one. Men didn't open their jaws impossibly wide and chomp into you. Men didn't grow fur and claws and leave your stomach torn wide, held only together by over sixty stitches. Men didn't have eyes that glowed red at night and they didn't howl at the moon.

She was Lydia Martin, damn it. She was rational, could do a double variable equation in under a minute or synthesize a Molotov Cocktail without breaking a sweat. One day she'd be at Harvard or MIT, working her way into history for a theorem only she could understand.

Lydia didn't sit in a room, spacing out and thinking about the werewolf-yes, the goddamn werewolf-who had savaged her, didn't let her hand trail over the wound that was healing so slowly, didn't imagine herself in a month on all fours, slobbering at the moon.

That wasn't her.

Except it was today, wasn't it?

Today she was trying to figure out frantically when the next full moon would be, how to factor in the eight days she'd been unconscious. Today she was trying to remember how many pieces of silver jewelry she owned and what the fuck she was going to do with them now. Today she was nodding in the right places (she hoped) and snuggling down after bad Jell-O and her tired parents' throats gone hoarse with shouts. Today, she was wondering if that freak would come back for her.

If she'd want him to.

As she curled in on herself, trying desperately to get herself to fall asleep and dream of anything but of sprouting fur and twisting bone, something else flitted through her mind, something fuzzy from maybe the day after the dance. She'd woken up just a little, roused a tiny bit when a door had slammed shut in her room.

Two voices, familiar.

_Stiles and Scott, Frick and Frack _.

Stiles, concern in his voice, something real, something she didn't hear in her father's even now, Stiles asking the question that was tearing through her mind even now:

_What the Hell is she? _

Nine days. Nine day since she was bitten.

In another nineteen she'd know, know if she were even human anymore, but before then?

It was time to figure out just what the Hell Stiles knew about it.

About her


	2. Chapter 2

"Dad's called in his attorney."

That was the statement over her first breakfast back at home. Not "how are you feeling, honey," not a "is there anything I can get you," sure as shit not "your dad and I are going to get along until you're better at least." No, just that announcement over Special K and a protein shake.

No longer hungry, Lydia pushed her bowl away from her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Her mother frowned and played with the gold chain around her neck. "He's suing for a change in custody arrangements. He doesn't think that between this and the mountain lion incident at the video store in the fall that I should have primary custody."

Lydia snorted. It was nice that a near fatal attack got her father's attention the _second_ time around. At one level, she couldn't complain too much about her father. He did pay alimony and child support regularly, never once late. He took her every other weekend at his home in the other side of Beacon Hills, the one in the only gated community in town. He kept her in Prada and Louis Vuitton when she asked. Economically, she wanted for nothing.

Of course, she did resent five years ago, he'd started living the cliche with his secretary and, while he was more than passionate about telling mom what she was doing wrong as a parent, he never was very active in his role. Even when she was at his house, it was lounging by the pool in the summer or flipping through channel after channel bored out of her mind in the winter. She often saw Monica, her dad's secretary-cum-new fiance more than her dad.

So the thought he was now suing for custody was hilarious.

Hell, maybe Monica was infertile.

"I'm serious."

"Oh I know you are mom but he's...he wouldn't know what to do with me. Even if he did, it's ten miles from here. I'd even still be at the same school."

Her mother frowned, lines struggling to show but couldn't quite on her face through all the Botox. "You'd want to live with him?"

"Of course not. I just...I can get why dad wigged out, but he'll get bored with this in about three days when something comes up at the office. What happened wasn't your fault. I was at the dance. The school let some animal on the grounds. It's really _their _fault."

Or hers for wandering off to the lax field alone to look for Jackson. Not that there was anything to be blamed for as far as her mom could tell. She was bitten, yeah. She'd had a long hospital stay that insurance was covering in full, also yes. Alas, she was going to have a scar that would keep her from ever wearing a bikini again, but as far as her parents knew, Lydia was out of danger.

But Lydia could blame herself, blame her own stupidity over someone who didn't even love her, who'd never treated her very well, for driving her out alone that night. If she did start howling at the moon in eighteen days, she only had herself to answer to.

"I know, but you're not very upset by the news."

"I'm not hungry anymore."

"True. I...would you rather live with dad?"

Lydia snorted. "Not really, it'd be a commute and a pain in my ass. Mom, I just, I still feel pretty weak. I have a ton to catch up with in my classes-"

"I spoke with the principle actually, and all your teachers agreed that it's okay for you to skip this semester's finals."

"What?"

"You have over a ninety-five average in every class. There's no point in the final exams because you've done the work."

She nodded and let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. The way everything was going, even though she didn't need to study much, any reviewing would be impossible. She wasn't sleeping well for obvious reasons and the only thing she could think about was the man lunging for her before he changed and bent and warped into a wolf so impossibly large.

If she closed her eyes, she saw red ones boring into her.

"That's good."

"Honey, it's Saturday, everyone had finals last week and you have a couple days to rest before school starts back up for the second semester, okay? Just use them. I'll take care of everything with dad. Hell, I promise when you're better we'll take a weekend trip to San Diego, shop until even you drop."

She forced herself to smile, even if she was usually colder to her mother. Lydia liked her mom fine; she just wasn't effusive with emotion. It wasn't in her natures except sometimes with Jackson. "Mom, that'd be okay but it has to be a real store. I'm talking Neiman Marcus not Macy's."

"That's my girl. I have an emergency client meeting today though. Is that a problem?"

"You're in PR, not a doctor."

"You should see what Bob King of King's auto managed to do at the mayor's ball last night. He's gonna need all the PR he can get, stat."

She laughed and shook her head. "You owe me a story, but, yeah, I'll be fine. Just me, my pj's and eventually I'll call Allison. No problem."

Her mom sighed. "Honey, Allison's busy right now. Her...I hate to be the one to break you in on everything."

"But?"

"Her extended family's still in town."

"For what and since when?"

"Since the animal that attacked you also managed to kill her Aunt Kate."

Five separate messages in six hours.

_Five _.

Allison was screening her. Lydia could understand. Having your aunt, who was really more like a cool older sister, be murdered would weigh on anyone. Clearly, Allison's tight knit family wasn't taking it well. Still, Lydia was back and Allison was her friend, probably her only good one who wasn't just hanging out with her to jockey for position or have bounce off popularity. She'd go over to the Argents tomorrow regardless of if Allison was in a friend mood.

Damn it.

She was Allison's best friend and now was one of those times when you'd need a BFF by your side. That said, Lydia wasn't sure what to say. There was no way Allison could know that her aunt had been killed by a werewolf and not by a random wild animal. There certainly was no way for Lydia to explain that or why she _knew _it was true. It just made her sound insane.

Lydia sat on her bed, her small giraffe cuddled on her knee. She'd already spent the bulk of morning tracking down information on werewolves. Finding information wasn't her problem. The internet was full of it. The problem was the internet had information on everything. For every site that said Wolf's Bane was fatal, there was another that said that silver was the only way to kill werewolves. For each site that swore werewolves were only humanoid and bipedal under the full moon, there was a different one that claimed they were always just larger wolves, four paws and all.

Some sites promised a cure and others swore it was impossible.

The cure was what Lydia was most interested in. She wasn't going to grow paws and a tail and start killing people. She was Lydia Martin, Goddamn it, control incarnate. She wasn't going to become some snarling beast, put her mom and her friends in trouble.

What little there was about a cure-and even on the internet there wasn't much-insisted that there was nothing one could do to cure a born lycanthrope. If you were born with the curse, it was too ingrained in your nature to get rid of. Bitten wolves, however, at least on some sites, could be cured if they murdered the wolf who'd made them. They had to do that and eat their heart.

She wanted to vomit thinking about that, but if that was what it took, if she had to hunt that freak down and win the survival of the fittest to stay human.

She'd do it.

Except...wait.

Lydia went to the county police records and logged in (Long ago, she'd flirted the password for Sheriff Stilinski's account from Stiles. A girl never knew when that would come in handy.). The records for Kate Argent's death made her chest tighten.

According to the coroner and police reports _both _, Kate's body with its throat torn out had been found in the Hales' burned out mansion. Not far off on the property were the charred remains of a mountain lion. Either Kate had managed to set it alight before it had limped off...

...well that's what some of the questions and spec in one of the police reports listed.

But there had never been any goddamn mountain lions. If Kate's body had been found near a charred animal skeleton, something that the clean up crews had guessed about the species, then it didn't bode well. Kate Argent, or someone else after her, had managed to kill the wolf who'd attacked her and bitten Lydia, herself. If that charred bit of "mountain lion" were the man who'd bitten her, then a cure was no longer an option.

Frustrated, Lydia took a deep breath. That wasn't going to help her. She had to stay rational, work the equation. Stiles and Scott knew something. They were deeper in this than they wanted anyone to know. She just needed to know what Stiles knew. Entering some code, she made a minor adaptation to the database. Now she'd get an email alert every time "Sheriff Stilinski" searched the archives. A few minutes more and she was running a screened back check on everything the "sheriff" had poured over recently online in both the Sheriff's Station and Coroner Databases.

Several days in a row, since the dance, had been spent reviewing personal files and any type of public records for Peter Hale.

_Hale _.

Like the house where the cops found Kate's body, like Derek Hale the chief suspect, like that fire long ago when they'd all still be in primary school.

Whatever was happening was related between at least Stiles, Scott and Derek Hale's family, if not something deeper with at least Allison's aunt.

Minimizing the databases, Lydia did a simple Google search on "Peter Hale."

It came back with images of him from the last Homecoming before mansion burned down; he'd been the alumni chair of all the adult events. Lydia blinked at the picture in front of her. It was the same man who'd changed and bitten her, cursed her.

Peter had been a werewolf, and Derek most likely was one. Scott, too, considering his unreal transformation from lax team reject and permanent bench warmer to team superstar. There weren't even steroids that good. Derek **and **Scott probably werewolves...God, what? Like a pack? Would she have to start running with them?

Lydia shook herself out of any train of thought that led to images of her on all fours or eating live rabbits. There was one other idea she had. Going to Gmail, she used Stiles's log-in name (she'd received more than a few emails from him before the dance with reams of plans), and hesitated over the password. She wasn't a hacker, not like people said Danny was. She could do a little, not much. She certainly couldn't crack email accounts.

But it was _Stiles _and she wouldn't have to think hard for this.

She entered her first name plus his lax jersey number on the password line and held her breath, only releasing it when the log in worked. Stiles was too predictable.

Looking over the sent folder for the most recent emails he'd written, Lydia rolled her eyes. They were almost all to Scott and, apparently, Stiles was smart enough to have come up with a code about the lycanthropy stuff. Now, since she knew both of them and knew neither had an interest in growing azaleas, it was obvious they were planning things out about something completely different. She was able to follow things enough to realize that Stiles always had suggestions **or **questions. "Had you done this yet?" or "Did you try that technique I read up on?" Sometimes things like, "Is Derek still being an annoying 'master gardener?'"

Stiles wasn't.

Derek yeah, probably who bit Scott, even. Stiles was the brains but not the wolf.

The newest email was one to the local vet about an appointment Stiles was making to see him in person at his office tonight about joining his azalea appreciation and research society.

Jesus.

How many people in this town either were werewolves or knew enough about werewolves to be research specialists in them, **friends **of them?

Lydia wasn't sure she wanted to know.

One thing she was going to do, damn it, was be at the Beacon Hills Animal Hospital at eight. Stiles was going to talk to her. She'd make him do it, if she had to, and she still had plenty of things in her chemistry set that could be used to be persuasive, one way or another...


End file.
